[Hawkular-dev] Hawkular Metrics 0.4.0 - Release & Beyond

[Stefan Negrea]

Hello Everybody,

I am happy to announce release 0.4.0 of Hawkular Metrics. The release is anchored by new Counter metric implementation, various stability enhancements, and Grafana integration updates.


Release Updates

There was an email thread on Hawkular Devel List about 1 week ago that announced some minor changes to the release process for Hawkular Metrics. This release is the first to apply the plan. Going forward, the project will follow JBoss Project Versioning (https://developer.jboss.org/wiki/JBossProjectVersioning) guidelines.

To avoid confusion here is an explanation of the release version number. The current release 0.4.0.Final contains the code that was initially planned under 0.3.5. The version bump was required to align the release version with the release mechanics. But there are no surprising commits or changes in functionality that were not expected to be released.



Here is a list of major changes in this release:

1) Documentation
 * Added a new, Metrics specific, documentation section on the Hawkular  website 
 * Installation, configuration and Grafana integration are covered
 * Link: http://www.hawkular.org/docs/components/metrics/index.html

2) External Integration
 * The Grafana graph panel editor is now able to autocomplete the metric name
 * Documentation regrading the Grafana integration is now covered by the official Hawkular Metrics documentation (see above)
 * Heapster versions 0.14.0 and up can use Hawkular-Metrics as their time series data storage.

3) Updates to core API** (https://issues.jboss.org/browse/HWKMETRICS-113)
 * Metric is now a concrete type. GaugeMetric and AvailabilityMetric classes have been removed.
 * The new DataPoint class replaces the former GaugeDataPoint and AvailabilityDataPoint classes.
 * All of the new model classes are immutable. We will continue refactoring to make model classes immutable.
 * Swagger and Jackson dependencies have been removed from core

4) Cassandra
 * Cassandra Java driver upgraded to version 2.1.6 (https://issues.jboss.org/browse/HWKMETRICS-109)
 * Embedded Cassandra is no longer part of the Hawkular Metrics
 * Cassandra is now an integral part of Hawkular Project
 * Embedded Cassandra has been moved to Hawkular Commons(https://github.com/hawkular/hawkular-commons) repository
 * For now, will keep including the compatible embedded jar distribution as part of the release downloads
 * NOTE: the embedded Cassandra should only be used for testing, debugging, or developing Hawkular Metrics. In production environments please use a full Cassandra deployment.

5) Updated Counter Metric (https://issues.jboss.org/browse/HWKMETRICS-53, https://issues.jboss.org/browse/HWKMETRICS-59)
 * Core and REST APIs support reading/writing counters
 * Core API supports generating and reading rates
 * REST API for rates will come in next release

6) Developer tools
 * Gatling load testing scenario added
 * Source code: https://github.com/hawkular/hawkular-metrics/tree/master/load-tests
 * This is part of the on-going effort for testing and performance profiling


Github Release:
https://github.com/hawkular/hawkular-metrics/releases/tag/0.4.0

JBoss Nexus Maven artifacts:
http://origin-repository.jboss.org/nexus/content/repositories/public/org/hawkular/metrics/

Jira release tracker:
https://issues.jboss.org/browse/HWKMETRICS/fixforversion/12327451/



Hawkular Metrics 0.5.0 & Beyond

1) Gauge Aggregates - Long-term storage of numeric metrics at the expense  of losing some fidelity. With task queue released in 0.3.4, the  expectation is to start the actual implementation 0.5.0.
2) Update REST testing - while the current set of tests is a good gauge    for regressions, the overall coverage is still low.
3) Improved docker and kubernetes support - this is a long term goal for the project
4) The counters will received improved REST API support 
5) Initial support in the Python & Golang clients for counters


A  big "Thank  you" goes to John Sanda, Thomas Segismont, Mike Thompson, Matt Wringe, Michael Burman, Jirka Kremser, and Heiko Rupp for their  project  contributions.


Thank you,
Stefan Negrea

Software Engineer